Author: devangoldstein

On the Value of Modernism: A Repost/Riposte for Jeanne-Claude

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The piece below first appeared in April 2005 on One Blog Two Blog, a concept blog that featured Jay Fanelli and me each responding to a prompt in 600 words or less. The prompt for this piece was “Best 86ed Idea in 86 Years,” a response to the Red Sox first World Series win in—you guessed it—86 years.

At the end of the piece, I discuss “The Gates,” by Jeanne-Claude and Christo; I repost the piece today in honor of Jeanne-Claude, recently deceased.

You don’t see a lot of uninhabitable $8-million houses anymore. It’s also been a while since anybody went very far towards getting a 900-page stream-of-consciousness novel published (and it was no picnic the first time around).

Today, many of the artistic projects that constitute historical modernism inspire little more than discomfort, if they inspire at all. Understandably so: A perceived irrelevance of modern art, architecture, literature and music was a desirable effect for some of the great moderns, who took an elitist position in which the masses weren’t meant to grasp the deeper meaning of their works at all.

Modernism’s growing emphasis on individual freedom of expression after the Second World War led to an eventual unravelling and commercializing of the category, perhaps by way of noted celebrity stalker Andy Warhol. Such postmodern disarray certainly benefits me as I weigh the delicate balance between my pocketbook and my decorative tastes, but still I long for a time when artists challenged themselves instead of following any whimsical impulse that floated their way, as many seem to now. I’d rather live naked for a year in the Farnsworth House than walk through another masturbatory Venturi exhibit, for example, or hear another word about the “friendliness” or “exuberance” of the Las Vegas Strip. I’ve been there, and I don’t mind telling you the “friendliness” costs at least $200 and comes with a circus of crab lice.

More to the point, the assumption that pastiche itself is an art form, though not entirely objectionable, belies a deeper cultural conviction that places the consumer at the center of all art. After all, what is the promise of Vegas if not to see Paris, Egypt, and Times Square for $79 round-trip, plus the cost of getting shitfaced and whatever you lose at the slots? The consumer-as-Id model does little but infantilize the public, stuffing a neon pacifier in our mouths as soon as we open them to object.

To be sure, there are also objections to be made to modernism’s severity and exclusivity, but if we can’t have a wholesale return to the artistic rigor of modernism, let’s at least find some middle ground, some artistic space that is both challenging and inclusive, that encourages not consumption but enjoyment. Let’s take pleasure in the art itself, not in how little (or how much) we paid to see it.

As a closing note, I’d like to offer one last, late defense of The Gates, Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s recent installation in Central Park. Like modern art, The Gates took a simple concept (tall, rectangular archways draped with bright orange fabric) and followed it to an extreme (7,608 of those gates along the 23 miles of walkway in Central Park).

The duo’s project, though, unlike high modernism or postmodernism, sought to challenge their audience without mystifying us, or, from the other side, to embrace the public without coddling us. “Here are these gates,” they seemed to say. “We don’t care what you think of them but We’re glad you think it.”

A Note on the LHC and the Grandfather Paradox

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A New York Times piece that’s made the rounds in the last week or so takes up the idea that the Large Hadron Collider might not work for reasons involving to the grandfather paradox.

(If you’ve never heard of the grandfather paradox, head over to the Times piece now. I avoid describing it here so as not to taint what follows.)

One thing that irks me when people talk about the grandfather paradox: It’s not so much that you can’t go back and kill your grandfather; it’s that you always already didn’t do so (to co-opt a suddenly non-bogus phrase from the post-structuralists).

So the same goes for the LHC. I think the prediction on the table isn’t that something will happen to keep it from working; it’s that something already has (or, like, “already will have”—our verb tenses don’t do justice to the physics).

I have a pet peeve around the issue because this kind of not-quite-right summation kept me from really understanding the grandfather paradox for years.

For the Good of the Team: Football Coaches & Conscience

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In his latest essay for the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes about one of the greatest dangers football players face: long-term brain damage from all the impact. It’s a grim, worthwhile read.

Gladwell doesn’t discuss the element that most disturbs me: the role of coaches in perpetuating the “programm[ing],” as one former NFL player calls it, that keeps players putting the team above their own well-being.

Gladwell looks to the testimony of Kyle Turley, who played in the NFL for nearly a decade, to show how players with recent head, neck, or spine injuries decide to put themselves back in harm’s way “on behalf of the team.”

I understand that players get caught up in the physicality and camaraderie of the game, and how those factors might contribute to their making certain dangerous choices. But how can a coach feel OK about sending recently-injured players back out onto the field? How can he hold the good of the team above the short- or long-term mental and physical health of the player?

As Phil Ochs put it:

It’s always the old to lead us to the war,
Always the young to fall.

Don’t Hammer Screws: Nielsen on Social Media Outsourcing

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In his latest AlertBox entry, Jakob Nielsen effectively shows that “usability suffers when an organization puts its website content on social sites without adapting it to the particular site’s features.” This is true enough: One should no more use YouTube in the half-hearted ways Nielsen identifies than one should use a hammer on screws.

However, Nielsen also claims that this argument “count[s] in favor of keeping social features on your own site where you can design them to provide a better user experience for your customers.” I take issue with this claim: Nielsen’s blaming bad UX on social media platforms, when it rightly belongs with development teams (as it usually does).

In other words, it’s not that you can’t design good UX with social media outsourcing in place; it’s that the makers of the sites Nielsen points to just didn’t—whether for lack of vision, budget constraints, insufficient technical expertise, or laziness.

(In most cases, I suspect the difference comes down to people using site-provided widgets or embed code rather than APIs. Whether this is a failure of strategists, UXers, designers, or developers probably varies.)

Nielsen seems to acknowledge this distinction in his qualification to the first claim I cite above. That is, when he writes, “without adapting it to the particular site’s features,” he seems to understand that good UX featuring social media outsourcing is indeed possible.

As proof that it can be done, I offer up the following, a simple example of a site that does social media outsourcing right. (Full disclosure: I led the charges on strategy and UX for this site while working for Mind Over Media.)

Case Study: WUTube

Waynesburg University asked us to devise a media-rich, recruiting-focused site that featured students in their own environments. We wanted to outsource some of the material to YouTube and Flickr for a number of reasons, some of them likely familiar:

  • The budget for the project precluded dedicated media servers or high-end hosting.
  • Waynesburg’s target audience—prospective students (and their parents)—already lived on YouTube, and identified themselves as looking for a Waynesburg presence there.
  • The school’s staffing situation made an easy-to-use, low-cost data and media administration tool a mandatory for the project.
  • In a way that was admirably forward-thinking at the time, the school recognized the need to play a role on maintaining their online presence outside the classic “admissions microsite” model. In short, maintaining credibility demanded increased activity on YouTube in particular.

Note that the finished product, WUTube, avoids the pitfalls Nielsen identifies, in part through good design, in part by making heavy use of APIs for the various social media sites involved. Heavy customization, to be sure, but surely Martha Stewart and Harvard Business Publishing (two of Nielsen’s examples) could have sprung for it.

In particular, WUTube overcomes these obstacles (links are to screengrabs on Flickr):

  1. Nielsen’s categorization problem, wherein relying on the social media site’s default means of organizing content serves nobody. Instead, WUTube organizes all content—inluding videos—by student, which is to say, by the main draw to the site.
  2. Lousy titles for the media. WUTube’s administrators and the students involved have been diligent in creating fine, descriptive titles for the images and videos used on the site.
  3. Obtrusive, distracting branding. WUTube includes a set of branded hyperlinks, but they’re located out of the way on the home page. Otherwise, the content feels much more integrated with the site than in Nielsen’s examples.

Again, the problem Nielsen’s pointing to isn’t with the tools; it’s with organizations using them poorly.

The Interrolimb?: A New Punctuation Mark

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I see a new combination of punctuation emerging, and demanding formal recognition. Consider an example in which the writer of an email, say, asks the recipient about possible meeting times. Some options for punctuation:

  1. Can we meet at any of these times: 12:30, 3:00, 4:30.
  2. Can we meet at any of these times? 12:30, 3:00, 4:30.
  3. Can we meet at any of these times: 12:30, 3:00, 4:30?
  4. Can we meet at any of these times?: 12:30, 3:00, 4:30.

Options 1 and 2 won’t work, as each one requires breaking grammatical form. In option 1, the writer abandons the requisite question mark; in option 2, no colon introduces the list of times, which thus becomes an incomplete sentence. Option 3 is more plausible, but the deferred question mark makes the opening interrogative clause “feel” wrong until one arrives at the end of the sentence.

Option 4, which I use often and hope will spread, accomplishes the goal of the sentence while keeping both question mark and colon in close proximity to the clauses to which they’re meant to apply.

I propose combining the two characters, ? and :, and naming the new mark the “interrolimb.”

The word follows the pattern established by the interrobang (a single character that can be used in place of !? or ?!), with a nod to the Greek roots of the word “colon”—which meant “limb” and so was also used in rhetoric to refer to clauses within sentences (just as we sometimes use “limb” to do).

As a first stab—and I’m no typographer—what do you think of these, set in Times?:

interrolimb 1Interrolimbs

(Thanks to Christian Schwartz for inspiring the second version.)